Simulating the World... in Emoji!

Yup! Emoji has been part of Unicode since 2010: <a href="http://emojipedia.org/unicode-6.0/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://emojipedia.org/unicode-6.0/</a>

Nicky Case

Woah. How does that work? Are these unicode characters? Windows supports copy/pasting unicode? (I tried it and it worked!!!)

Ken Stevens

Thanks Ken! So, you can click the icon, and copy-and-paste in your own emoji. You can get emoji here: <a href="http://getemoji.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://getemoji.com/</a> or if you're on a Mac, you can press Control+Command+Space to pull up the emoji menu. (also re: peace & aggressive men, that is a really interesting dynamic, looking forward to a model of it!)

Nicky Case

Hi Nicky, Love this tool. How do I control what emoji I get when I create a new rule? (It always seems to start with a cat next...) I would like to simulate the effect of wars on reducing aggressive males in a population (and how peace increases the proportion of restless aggressive males). But I'd like to pick my emoji for the simulation--is there a way I can do this? Thanks!

Ken Stevens

Thanks! :D

Nicky Case

Nicky, this is fantastic. :)

Tom Lieber

Lots of people have requested this, and I can't believe I didn't include it in the first place. Will do!

Nicky Case

That works. Thanks!

Kat Suricata

I would love to see a means of controlling how fast the simulation plays. (PS. What Imma do about it is ask you for another UI control.)

Boondoggle

Aw, that's really awesome! Thank you for making this. But yeah, this definitely points at one important thing needed for a *real* simulation creator: VARIABLES. Which I currently don't have. That way, you don't have to create the same thing over and over again, like you did above. Also, I think variables could solve that wave-loops-back-on-itself problem, which I see you've tried to solve by adding lots of antibiotic-states. Again, despite all that, seeing that this simple tool can still sorta-model EVOLUTION is really cool, so thank you!

Nicky Case

Yeah, Linux doesn't support emoji out-the-box. (which is odd, coz emoji's now part of the Unicode standard?) Anyway, I'll find a backup solution for browsers that don't support emoji! (In the meantime, and you don't have to, you can download & install the Symbola font to get emoji, amongst other Unicode Standard symbols: <a href="http://users.teilar.gr/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://users.teilar.gr/</a>~g1951d/)

Nicky Case

Linux Mint 17.2, Firefox 42. :)

Kat Suricata

Dang, looks like your browser doesn't support emoji. :/ What browser version + OS version are you using? (I'll most likely need to find an emoji backup library...)

Nicky Case

Kat Suricata

Here's my first take: <a href="http://ncase.me/emoji-prototype/?remote=-K3zzVn2zbrFXPGZcskf" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://ncase.me/emoji-prototype/?remote=-K3zzVn2zbrFXPGZcskf</a> [currently broken- but the idea is there...] An antibiotic-resistance evolution sim! Bacteria will spawn randomly, not very resistant to bacteria When bacteria grows, it has a chance to mutate to a higher resistance, or to a lower resistance Click a blank area to dose it with antibiotics In *theory*, you'd think slow doses would kill out weak ones, leaving the strong to breed. But there are a couple issues with how I have "dosing" set up (very hard to apply very high doses). Still needs work hah. Anyhow- UI Feedback: Copy/Paste of rules would be reeealy nice. So would re-ordering... uh... agents? Whatever each emoji+ruleset entity is. Also reorder individual rules within an agent? (You might even have those features, and I've just missed em...). Ok. Back to work!

Phil Dougherty